 Welcome to a new and ancient story, a show dedicated to the transformation of self and society. We're moving from the story of separation to a new story of interbeing. We explore it all, technology, spirituality, agriculture, healing, economics, politics, ecology, relationships, education, because the changes that are gathering today will leave no aspect of our world untouched. For deeper engagement with these ideas, join our community at newandancientstory.net. Well, hello everybody. Charles Eisenstein here with our guest for this episode, Amy Vansky, who I first became aware of through a book that she wrote called Impossible Cure. I liked the title alone. Slept with it under my pillow for a while. Never read the thing, but no, no, just kidding. I did read, I don't remember how much of what I read. It was a long, long time ago. I think it was maybe when the book first came out. 2003 came out. 2003, yeah. And we'll talk about that book a little bit, but also some of what Amy's moved on to. It's an example of what I call creeping radicalization, where at first you discover that one certain aspect of our system isn't quite right. It's corrupt, but everything else is fine, of course. It's just this one bad apple on the barrel. So maybe the medical system is a little bit corrupt, but educational system, that's fine, and politics, maybe a few little things that need to be fixed, global economy, but then the radicalism begins to spread until it encompasses everything. And so looking at your bio, I got the sense that that might have happened. So got anything to say for yourself about that? Well, I think that in order to become what I become, I had to start with a little different than most people to begin with. So I do reflect on that, because how did I go from being a computer scientist? I know I can introduce myself. People don't know who I am a little bit. So I have a PhD in computer science from Stanford. So that was my life, math and computer science and Silicon Valley and all that. But I think underneath that, I was always kind of a spiritual person. So I went to a parochial school. I think I was one of the few people actually took the spiritual part seriously. I felt it. It wasn't just... So I always had a somewhat of an interest in spirituality of some kind. So I had that inclination. And before I even discovered homeopathy through, I guess we'll talk a little bit about that. I was already exploring a little bit about alternative medicine, but I didn't really know much. But I was also super into medicine. I don't know. My husband, back in my husband, who's also a computer scientist, he used to always say, why don't you just go to medical school? Because I would sleep with the Merck manual next to my bed and rereading it. He thinks I'm like a medical expert, but I just accumulate a lot of medical knowledge over the years. And so, yeah. So I don't know if you want me to go on how this all happened. Well, I'm curious. I mean, what I found really moving was just the whole story. Like, how did you come to write a book called Miracle Cure? Impossible cure. Impossible cure. Yeah. I mean, I kind of know the story, but maybe you can share... Okay. So here I was, a researcher in computer science. I had two kids, two little boys at the time who were three and six. Now they're 24 and 27, interest, unbelievably. And my younger son was showing signs of what we learned was autism. So this was like at the very beginning of this autism epidemic. And I was like super, conventional medicine-oriented person. We would give every vaccination. We would do everything. Although I would dabble and taking a Qigong class or something like that, I didn't... I would always... I was totally whited to allopathic medicine. But obviously, something was wrong with him and we had gotten to the stage where the nursery school kicked him out and something was just wrong. I had an older son so I could see things weren't right. Did this happen all of a sudden or do you think he was kind of born with it? No, no, no. He was fine until... Well, I have a lot of retrospect. I look back at videos and stuff. I think he started going downhill. I actually think it was vaccination induced, but it was a slow gradual decline. So he was progressing normally. And then at around, I would say, before age two, he just started drifting away. So it wasn't one of... I mean, I'm sort of a... Because it was an autism story, I'm now sort of... I'm not as much in that world anymore, but I became very embedded. And some of these kids are just very stark and they... It's very extreme. In his case, it was like a slow drifting away into his own world, right? So he was happy at home, but he was just not making... He was no longer responding to his name, making eye contact as much with us, yes, but not at school. He was starting to do more classic autistic things. But this was before... This was 1994. So he was born in 1991. So it was before everybody was tuned into this. It was right at the beginning. Actually, that was the year it really increased. And his birth cohort was when it really started going up. I can talk about that. I don't know if I want to get into all of that. But anyway, so we were searching. He was in various therapies. And then I was reading an article in Mothering Magazine, which you probably know about. Yeah, yeah. It's become less radical in recent years, but it was more radical then. And there was an article by somebody who... I mean, I know everybody in the homeopathic world, and somebody named Judith Reichenberg-Ohman, who is a natural path, who does a lot with ADD kids. And so I didn't know anything really about homeopathy. So, three-page article. And I just went, ding! And I had my husband read it. I'm really lucky he went along with me on this journey, because he's a computer scientist, too. Still does computer science. And so we went to a homeopath. We found one. And within like a week or two, we were actually within like five days, there was some kind of noticeable change to his therapist. We didn't tell her. We had started on this remedy. She noticed, she said, what did you do? Because suddenly there was this subtle change. And his... Anyway, it was a slow, gradual process, but it was very a beautiful, I know now, like a very ideal kind of beautiful cure. And so, and within... by the time he was five, we started at three and a half. By the time he was five, he was testing normally, but he was still, like I would say, socially immature. You know, if you really could notice things, you might notice some oddities. And we... by the time he was in first grade, we put him back into this whole private school that my other son was in. And he was doing fine. But every year, the teacher would go, you know, we just don't get it. He's just not... there's things that were just off. But that, even that with changes of remedies and stuff stopped by the time he was like in fourth grade. So I would say, you know, it got 80% there, you know, in the first couple of years. And then by the time he was like 10, he would be fine. Like, so anyway, so obviously this was mind-blowing to me. You know, it was just... and to my husband. And then we all started using homeopathy. So, you know, it's just... it's like it doesn't... it's... if this works, you know, if this highly potentized, you know, not even a molecule of substance thing has dramatic changes like that, then, like you say, the world isn't what we thought it was. And so I started... you know, there was this whole thing that started happening in my life then. This was back in 94, 95, 96. I started, you know, doing other kind of energy explorations. You know, I remember I went to a workshop by Barbara Brennan, you know. Yes, yes. And then I also wrote a paper. I mean, this is... this sounds so nerdy. So I'm just... I just want to break in here because while you were talking, I just, you know, tuned into an article on quackwatch.com.org called homeopathy the ultimate fake. So how do we know that you're not just hysterical anti-vaxxer parent who, you know, panicked and imagined your child was having symptoms of autism and then went through this, you know, essentially sugar pill regimen and, you know, imagined that there was a cure when actually it was just your hysteria to begin with. Like there's this whole narrative that... Yeah. Well, okay. I mean, I mean, that's totally fair, you know. I mean, I don't actually believe that, but I'd like to bring the shadow side out here. So people don't think that... let me just finish. Like people don't think that we've just kind of hitched our wagons to the latest craze and abandoned our critical reason, but that we've actually faced that, considered that possibility. And having done that, still believe in the efficacy of... I mean, homeopathy is just the beginning of the rabbit hole, right? Yeah. Yes, it is. And well, there's so many things I could say to that. I mean, I guess the fact that I have a PhD from Stanford is helpful to some people and believing me. Right. But I think that, well, I mean, one thing I learned when I started learning about homeopathy, obviously I start reading about it, is that it really has this venerable, very scientific history and that the people who do it are not weirdos or things like that. They've been, you know, there's a huge history and there still is all over the world of medical doctors and all over the world using homeopathy successfully. Okay. And so, and that's one of the reasons I wrote my book. You know, my book Impossible Care. Yeah, I wrote, I titled it that because people say it's impossible and because also the cure of autism or these other diseases is impossible. But anyway, so there, and so I do include in my book all these scientific studies, there's tons of medical studies, clinical, even lab studies, you know, on. Right. Which is interesting. Like, it's interesting that, that, you know, you can enter that world. I also looked up homeopathy on the skeptics dictionary. Yeah. Says in black and white, right there in the screen, that the overwhelming majority of studies on homeopathy confirm that it is no more effective than placebo. Which is false. Unfortunately, that's just false. But there it is, like in black and white. And so if, if, if somebody wants reassurance that the world is pretty much what science has told them it is, they can find that reassurance. And if you don't like dig deeper, then you're going to stay in the reality that you were in. You don't even have to dig that deep because you can, you know, on my side on other sides, you can find, you know, links to hundreds of articles. Okay. And more and more. And most, but most of them are in the United States. They're in India or Europe where homeopathy is really accepted. Unfortunately, I mean, you know, big money is behind getting rid of homeopathy here. Here's another reason though. Like, I mean, there's a big reason why big pharma funds these skeptics to destroy homeopathy. And it's not because of homeopathy per se, but because the fact that these ultra dilutions work. Because think about it, if you can take any substance like a, like an allopathic normal drug and potentize it, and it still works, then, then there goes big pharma, right? So I've written articles about that. Because drugs are free then, essentially. How disappointing. Is there profit motive into this? So, so, so for example, you know, I mean, proof that this is that there's something that like, for example, there's this very famous Nobel Prize winning medical scientist named Luc Montaigneur, who won the Nobel Prize for making the connection between AIDS and HIV not that long ago, a French scientist. And he recently started working on ultra dilutions and discovered yes. And it wasn't even ultra dilutions of, of allopathic drugs, it was of DNA. And he had found the same effects. And so immediately after this happened, he lost his funding. And you know, where he has to do his research now in China, because like, you know, they're not, yeah. So, so, you know, what is the Luc Montaigneur become, you know, insane? Anyway, in my experience, these quackbusters are, are not the most intelligent people often and have an axe to grind or their or whatever. It's, it's just another form of negativity and stuff. I don't know. So yes, I am on their radar. But I think sometimes I think it's even best not even to engage them. No, I don't. It's impossible. Yeah. You know, I found the same thing, you know, you might ask what happened when all my colleagues with all my colleagues, my computer science colleagues, what did they think of me? That's a good question. What did they think? When I left this behind. Yeah. I mean, eventually, I, I eventually, thanks to like one of the, one of the reasons was that my husband was still computer scientist and two I had invested in a startup of a friend of mine and made a bit of money. And so I realized that, that I could devote myself to these more esoteric pursuit that what did they think they couldn't believe it because I really was one of the, I was getting kind of famous in computer science and I was one of the few women and, you know, I felt bad leaving it behind, but it just seemed so meaningless to me compared to, to what happened to my son to helping other people. And now, I mean, really, my mission is to, is this more about consciousness? That's my second book. To, you know, like what you're trying to do to help the world to change and evolve our consciousness. So, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, so what did they think? What did these colleagues think? Some of them, okay, my friends, if they, they completely couldn't get it, know not to discuss it with me. All right. So there are some of my friends. I lost that last sentence. It didn't come through very clearly. Can you? Okay. Some of my friends who can't go there, they just know not to discuss it with me. So we'll discuss other subjects. Some, but the, some of them who know me and respect me have started to use homeopathy and it works for them. It's, it's worked. I, I sometimes get these kind of surreptitious emails from computer scientists. Oh, you know, my, you know, my kids, blah, blah, blah. Can you help me? I heard you help this other computer scientists. So like those things happen too. I am, and then, and then, and I have found, interestingly, that the most brilliant, the people who I view as truth geniuses in my field are the ones who actually listen and are respectful and actually give me credence. So that's, I think, very interesting because they are, I'm not talking about just smart guys. Then I know a lot of the smart people from Stanford, but there are some who are like the real geniuses. There's not many of them. They're the ones who are actually, you know, actually pay attention and actually start reading about it and start thinking about it. So it's interesting. Anyway, I don't know if you want to keep going along that track. Well, yeah, I'm interested in the way that paradigms shift. And so here, here are people who are wedded or immersed in what I call the old story, which lays out how the world works and how healing happens, for example, and what to do if you get sick and what's possible and what isn't possible. And, and that world also maybe is divided into, from that perspective, there are the rational up-to-date people who, you know, follow the latest medical advice. And then there are the kind of fringe people, the hippies, the irrational people, the superstitious people, right? And so in that world, you, the PhD computer scientist, would surely be among the rational modern people. So when you then come in and say, Hey, guess what? I've cured my child of autism using homeopathy. That is an anomalous data point that doesn't fit into the paradigm. So when people are confronted with that, they have a choice. Either they can maintain their paradigm, which necessitates explaining away your story. For example, Amy's gone off her rocker. She's brilliant at computer science, but outside of that, she's a bit baddie or something, right? They have, they have to fit you in somehow to their paradigm, or just to ignore it, say, you know, I'm just not going to think about it. Like that happens to people all the time. They have some maybe even transcendent experience. They see a UFO. You know, something happens, but they just kind of put that into the category of not going to think about that, going to go on with my life. So that's how, that's one choice, you know, they can maintain their paradigm. The other choice is to allow their world to be blown open, to take it seriously. And then, because if that's true, then what's true? And then if that's true, then what's true? Like the whole thing unravels potentially just from one data point, you know, you have, I mean, it's just like in science, if you have a theory and a data point that doesn't fit into that theory, you can either discard the data point, which is very often what scientists do, or you can, you know, come up with a different hypothesis that can incorporate that new data point. And perhaps the, you're saying it's the genius people who are most open to it. Perhaps that's maybe the essence of genius is that you are open to something from beyond what you already knew. Otherwise, you're not a genius. Otherwise, you're just kind of elaborating something that already exists. And that's what most science and most scientists are just, like I call it, there's a phrase in computer science called the closed world assumption. So they have, you have all the stuff that works within that closed system. And they're just, you know, finding every ramification within that closed system. And it's the real genius who are open up and, you know, admit new information. That's how those scientific revolutions happen. So it's not surprising to me, it's not surprising that, that, you know, some of the most open-minded ones are the ones, you know, who, who bring in the new in their field are also open-minded to, you know, allowing their paradigms to be disrupted and entering the world that you're inviting them into through your story. Yeah, it's so interesting because, you know, in my journey from homeopathy and then consciousness, all the stuff I've, I've just, you know, it is, you know, I write a lot about synchronicity and homeopathy is, and about the relationship between homeopathy and synchronicity and all this stuff. Anyway, I've met Rupert Sheldrake. I mean, I know all these people, Dean Raiden, in fact, my husband ended up doing some of the programming work for Dean Raiden's experiment at one point. And I mean, I know all these people now and it's, the same people are attacking them as attack homeopathy. It's the same forces because they just can't, you know, it just can't be admitted. These, these anomalies can't, simply can't be admitted if you're going to keep that mind frame going. And it's the same now with, with medicine too. Yeah. So I don't know what the answer to that is exactly, except, you know, you have to just stay true to what you know. I mean, you know, if something dramatic happens, actually, often it is something to, that's one thing I love about homeopathy. It's, because a lot of these phenomena are very subtle, or you can say it's coincidence, or, you know, even side phenomena are very subtle. It doesn't happen all the time. You can say every synchronicity is a coincidence. But if you, if you, if you have, you know, if you've been sick for six, for six weeks, or if you give an animal who's super sick and you give them a dose of something, and then suddenly they get better, it is not even you like came and say placebo effect, some animal, you know, your dog. Then it's dramatic. It's like, hey, it works. It's like, how can this be? Right. And you can still, I mean, you can still chalk it up to coincidence or something like that. But you, but if you do that, like what I want people to understand is if you do that, you're making a choice based on something that's not evidence. You know, you're making, if you choose to say, well, that was just coincidence. Yeah, that's one interpretation. Another interpretation is that homeopathy works. And the evidence alone cannot actually compel you to make one of those two choices. Yeah. It's a choice. And I think this is actually, to me, you know, I don't think I've left science as my scientific rational mind behind. I mean, in fact, to be a good homeopath, you have to be very analytical and stuff. It's a very analytical time. But I think that what I did and what I do in all my writing is now expand what my view of reality is. So it's not like I've left, you know, there is a physical reality which operate more or less according to the physical laws that we know. But there's, I believe there's this now expanded reality more than that. And that's kind of what my second books about. Yeah. And even complicating that issue is that physical is much, much more than we thought it was, you know, and this kind of between physical and spiritual or physical and non physical is making less and less sense when especially with, especially with homeopathy, when some of the water science now is confirming that the physical structure of water, it's not just this kind of ideal fluid, you know, with generic particles swimming around randomly, but it, but it can hold structure that can carry information. Well, is that fear, is that physical, you know, or is that it's all of that because like, think about what Rupert Sheldrake says, yes, you have a brain, you know, and there's stuff going on in the brain. I'm sure your brain is doing a lot of the work of our, you know, of our day to day consciousness, but beyond it's the brain is part of the system. It's all connected. So yes, the water is affected. And there might be more effects as well. You know, I mean, at these higher deeper and deeper levels of reality, maybe I don't think of, I don't think of these other realms as, as spear is necessary as nebulous or metaphorical, I think they're just deeper forms of science, we just don't know about yet. So, so just like people didn't know about electromagnetic fields, there's just deeper and deeper fields and they could be in higher dimensions. That's one thing I do discuss in my next book. I pause it, that part of what's going on with our higher energy bodies is higher dimensions in space, higher spatial dimensions. And I, yeah, it's a very broad book. My second book is called Active Consciousness. And I relate all of these things. The more, you know, Sheldrake's Morphic Field and it's all about similarity and vibration, whatever that means in these higher fields and synchronicity and sci phenomena and homeopathy, because that's about similar vibration to and the most amazing thing is that it all is connected to, to meaning, you know, it's not just to, it's not too violent strings vibrating similarly, just that it's actually related to meaning, like the, the field of vibration of fear or of, you know, any other kind of meaning. So, so, so I want to just change, of course, a little bit here. Yeah. You know, your, your book Impossible Cure arose out of a life-changing experience that you had with your son becoming autistic and then defying medical consensus and healing that. So now you're, you're more recent work into consciousness. Was there also a precipitating event or that you could share with us? Well, we'd like to have our minds blown here. Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, I think less of a precipitating event is more like what happened was, as I was going through, this was before I think I started writing Impossible Cure, but this sounds so nerdy, but I was inspired, this was around in 1995, so things had begun with my son. I watched the episode of Star Trek, the first episode of Deep Space Nine, where Benjamin Sisko goes into a wormhole and meets these four-dimensional aliens, you know? I just, I could not go to bed. I was like up all night thinking, what would it mean if you were four-dimensional, right? So then I start, I wrote this little paper, it was like the beginning of the internet, but I put it out there called Consciousness as an Active Force and it said, okay, well, if you're four-dimensional, that you can control how reality, you know, how it unfolds. It's the, you know, it's just like Bohm's theory of the, of the, the applicate in the absolute, explicate universe, you know, in that four-dimensional or higher dimensional realm, you can, if we're part of us can control that, we can affect how three-dimensional reality unfolds. So I related that to Psy and homeopathy and all these things, I was pretty nebulous in my mind and I put it out there and then all these people started writing to me over the years and interestingly at first it was all these physics journals and I'm like, hey, I don't know anything about physics. They even published it in one. I couldn't even understand any other paper in this journal. But like, but then it was, then people, other people were and then I had this moment, I was actually on the, on the board of the National Center for Homeopathy and they said, oh Amy, you should do this task and I really didn't want to do it. I knew, and I just, I was, you know, I just started receiving like, you know, things like, no, you shouldn't write this book about that paper. This was several years later and so I, and so I just said, okay, oh well, no, I'm not going to do that. I'm going to write a new book about this and then I went into a process because I am an academic really and I just started reading all these books like by the chief and Steiner and all these things and then wove it all together into this tapestry, which is my second book. Interestingly, now I'm into, I'm starting to write my third book, which is about Huna. I don't have you ever heard of Huna? No. It's a system of thought based on Hawaiian mysticism. Okay. And what I love about Huna is that it's a very practical system that's simple that, that captures all these ideas can be understood in terms of Huna, but it's just simple and it's very practical. You can use these techniques and they work and I experiment with all these things. I try them out and so... So tell me about some of these experiments. Like, like, have you, have you applied, you know, whatever you've discovered about consciousness or Huna, have you applied it in ways in your life that have brought dramatic results? Like, what's, what's changing in you? You know, what's, because I mean this, this transition that we're going through isn't only a paradigm shift that, that replaces one mental construct with another mental construct, right? We're shifting on every level. And, and so eventually, like, these new memes, these new paradigms, they, they, they sink in deeper and deeper and we begin to act from a different place. So can you tell us like, have you been, like, tell us, yeah, like, what's it like to, to deepen that into beyond the mental level? Okay, well, I mean, you know, I know that people can just interpret this in a different way, but a lot of times I use it for healing, you know, healing things, you know. So I had this instance where I suddenly had this really bad attack of sciatica. And it was just getting worse and worse. I couldn't like, why I was having to use a cane. It was terrible. It was like, about a month in, it was just getting worse and worse. I went to the osteopath. I did this and that. And then I knew it was precipitated by something that had upsetting that happened to me. Right. And so according to Huna, there's, I don't know if we want to get into all this, but there's a part of yourself, you might just call it your subconscious. But it's not, it's not, it's not your, it's not necessarily your ego. It's, it's much more than that. It's actually part of you that, that continues after you die and stuff like that. But it's that carries your emotions, has all your memories in it. And it's also where, that is where your sci phenomena occur. And it's, I think it's the astral body. But anyway, so this, this part of yourself, there's three parts of yourself and this part of yourself is very impressed by physical actions that you do, like rituals, writing things down. You have, you can't just think to it. You can't just say, yes, Amy, you had this, this upset. And that's what precipitated this horrible, you know, month of sciatica and stuff. No, you have to do, you have to do stuff. So you have to write down everything that's upset. I, so I use this now and actually my kids use it now too. So if I say, if you get some physical ailment, write down every single thing that's upsetting you to the, from the biggest to the smallest, even just a tiny little thing. And you have to write it down and you have to say it out loud and you have to talk out loud to this part of yourself. And then just, and then even better if you can do a little ritual of some kind, light a candle, talk to it and all like that. And, you know, after I started doing that, it was better within a couple days, two or three days. So, and this is, this is what who knows about is these, this is what a Hawaiian shaman would do is these kind of things. It's not necessarily about going to a shrink and talking about it for, for months. It's just doing these little ritual exercises. Some people would say, okay, you just, you know, it's just a psychosomatic thing and you tapped into it. Maybe that's not the best example. Another thing that happens to me more and more is, is synchronicities. So I don't know if those are examples of things. I love, I love hearing about synchronicities. Tell us, tell us a good juicy synchronicity. Here's one I think is amazing. I just think is amazing. So a couple of years ago, my husband and I drove cross country to Canada and for three weeks. Okay. And because we have a place in Canada and, and we listened to the iPod for three weeks with, he has like 10,000 songs on this iPod, you know, it has huge memory and stuff. And so then we spend the whole summer. We're coming back. We're driving into Buffalo because that's where I'm from. And we're nearing the bridge where we cross over into the United States. And just as, and I was really looking forward to coming back the year because we had driven cross country and it was like, I felt very love of America after driving cross country. And just about a mile or two from the border. Ray Charles comes on this iPod singing. Oh, beautiful. First face, the skies. And, and then just as just at the moment we're cross, there's a part in the bridge where like it's the Canadian flag and then the American flag, right? Yeah. You know, just at that point, and I didn't slow down or ton, you know, or whatever, it came to the crescendo of the song from sea to shining as we enter the United States. I said, Oh man, what is this? This is so amazing. There's another one I write about it somewhere. I guess I've written about it, which is that I was editing the chapter about Rupert Sheldrake in second book. And the next that night, Steve comes home, my husband, Steve comes home from work and says, where have you Sheldrake? I mean, I could never met him. Every time you move your head a whole lot or speak not toward the computer, the sound kind of. Okay. So I was editing the chapter about Rupert Sheldrake. I'd never met him. He was just some guy who lived in England who I thought was amazing. And my husband comes home from work at his research lab and computers, you know, in Silicon Valley and says, tomorrow we're having lunch with Rupert Sheldrake. It was just like amazing. It was like some guy in his lab had met Rupert Sheldrake at Scotland and said, next time you come to Silicon Valley, come give a talk. And then he came in, my husband found out and then they, he said, Oh, you actually know who this guy is. Well, you should pick him up for the train station and take him out to lunch. That's how it happened. So, all right, so I'm thinking here. Coincident. Yeah. Yeah. One idea that I explore, I mean, I'm actually very interested in ritual in a in the broadest possible sense of the word and interested in reframing a lot of the things that we do in our in modern life in terms of ritual. So medicine, for example, as a whole series of rituals, technology, even computers, you know, you're manipulating symbols and in this arcane language and reality changes as a result, like an extraterrestrial coming down and looking at a room full of computer programmers, like there they are wiggling their fingers around on the magic keyboard, you know, like that seems like ritual too. And this thing with the Huna that you're talking about that the, is there a name for this part? I remember like there's the coup and like these things. Okay, well, the three parts I'll give you the Hawaiian names. Yeah. All right, Unihi Pili is the lower self or Mike, I usually call the basic self. Yeah. And then there's the middle self, which is Uhane, which is the sort of rational mind, is the rational thinking, I think it's the mental body. But interestingly in Huna, that part of you has known all the memories are stored in the lower self, not the the middle self is sort of like the controller, but it is, it's just sort of rationality. It's just the thinking, you know. And then the higher self is called the almakua. You might have heard of that. Right. Each of those parts of you is also associated with, like you say, it's certain Hawaiian deities like. So the part that you were talking about though, that pays attention to physical things, what, which one was that? That's the lower self. Okay. And the basic self and usually it, you can think of it as often it has, is a sort of a, an awareness that's more like a young, youngish child or a teenager. And so it's usually cooperating and it's also in charge of your body. It's the most connected to your etheric body and your physical body. So, so the energy body. All right. So this basic self, yeah. So this basic self, it's impressed by actual physical actions. So perhaps when, and it's also an incredibly powerful aspect of self. Yes. And I'm suspecting that not only does it influence the physical body, but it probably also arranges life events to give us an experience of reality that matches our state of being. So I'm just kind of guessing here, but the reason I'm mentioning that is, is to flesh out the idea that, that the things that we do to affect our reality, say, you know, we write a check and we buy a car or, you know, something like that, or we, you know, log on to Amazon and we, you know, click something in the shopping cart and all that, right? Those are physical actions. And we explain that the package then comes to our door the next day through a causal chain that involves, you know, payment systems and warehouses and people getting paid to move things. And right, we have a story why that thing shows up at our door. But another way to look at it is that we have done the ritual that impresses that basic self, such that it arranges reality for this package to show up at our door. And that physical action has to feel, for it to be compelling, we can't do it thinking this is nonsense. This is an empty ritual, right? It has to actually, right? So, you know, I'm just, one thing I had in mind thinking about this is, okay, you know, if we can, if you can, because you're becoming immersed in this way of thinking. And so your practice of writing these things down and doing that little ritual, you know, it's working for you. And I wonder, you know, it's not only the physical body that might be sick, but the social body, the ecological body, the political body, there are terrible dysfunctions on this planet right now. And how would we use this, let's call it technology, how would we use this to impress upon the collective basic self, or the planetary basic self, that things need to change and we're ready for them to change. And perhaps even like, when people go out and protest, or they do direct actions, or they're doing something physical, and not just clictivism, but they're actually doing something physical, maybe that, even if the immediate result is not apparent, that they've, you know, maybe it's not apparent that they've achieved anything. Maybe all they achieved was they got arrested or something like that. And the system isn't changing. But maybe by repeating those things, we are communicating with a deeper self that has the power, like it's kind of a prayer. Right, right, right. Okay, so let me, I want to talk about two things, because I'm so interested in this now. Just from the standpoint of like, all those things happening and rain, like, in Huna, it's like these things rain down, I think it's like the synchronicities rain down in response to this kind of a prayer. That is considered to happen from the high self. So there's a prayer ritual that's kind of like what I call active, my thing in active consciousness about manifestation. But it's in the Hawaiian system too, where you the middle self constructs and makes the intention for the prayer. And then it's the, it's the basic self that has to build the energy and send the prayer up to the high self. And then the high self is the thing that can make things happen and change reality and create synchronicities and make pathways into the future. But now in response to what you say, I am writing in my book going to write about our collective basic self and the idea. So there's a process in Huna called ho-o-pono-pono. Yeah, that one's really beautiful process. Oh, yeah, yeah. So that's how you deal with like a family dysfunction. And it's not like going to, it's not like going to the family therapist for days and months and working out your bullshit, you know, it's just a simple ritualized procedure where each person, you know, says, you know, I, you know, there's, it can all happen in a few hours, although everybody has to come. And the idea is that the base, it's being worked out amongst the basic selves of the family. And so something actually happens and certain things are said and heard and then certain rituals are performed. And then, and the reason why these things are usually done is that one of the family members has become very sick or there's some drug addiction or something, you know, precipitates it and they understand the collective basic self of the family unit is screwed up and they need to do this to heal everybody because there's something bad in the juju of the family, you know. So same thing on the global level. Yeah, what would those rituals be? I mean, what could we do in the Middle East that would be simple rituals of the basic selves of these countries or these people, you know, but the part of the problem is that everybody has to agree to be there and do it and have sincerity in the process too. Yeah. So. Do you want to summarize the four steps of the Hawaii Ponopono? Oh, no, the four, the four steps of hope. I don't know, I can't remember what those exact steps are, but I can send them to you. But I have these four steps in my book of active consciousness, which was sort of a manifestation technique. It's different. It's a prayer ritual. I think the whole Ponopono ritual. It's like, you have to say, I'm sorry, forgive me, thank you, I love you, right? Yeah, it's something like that. Yeah. I have, I have it written down, but I'll be writing about it in my book. Right. It's not, so it's not the same thing as the prayer ritual, which is called the Ha ritual. It's a different process. Yeah. Yeah. So, yes, I think it's really important. How can we do it? I don't want to know. So, I mean, on a global level. But I think these, if it works on a person level, if it works on a family unit, if maybe we just need to build it up, it could work in a city level, a national level, maybe it could work in a global level. And what I'm interested in also is mapping existing practices onto some of these ancient teachings and vice versa. Maybe if you really analyze some of these, you know, some of these kind of maybe nonviolent communication retreats where people from different sides are brought together and they're put into dialogue and they're put in a situation where they can see each other's humanity and hear each other's stories and Yes, yes. Of course. But the thing that's really cool about it, and I don't know if it really would work, but I just feel it might, is that you don't have to if there's sincerity, if there's some kind of active thing, maybe that's enough to set a process in motion. It doesn't have to be, there has to be a sincere awareness that everybody is part of this more global issue. You know, I was actually in a Jewish Palestinian dialogue group for a few years. And so, and what can be a troublesome thing in that is that people come to it with an agenda, you know, they're not, so it's not really, it's both sides, whatever has to be saying we are together and we're all part of this. It can't be, you did this and you got to fix this and stuff like that, although you can express that, that's part of the ritual, you know. But they have to be open to something beyond what they already think they know, right, beyond the story that they're carrying into it, the story which could be, it's your fault you did this, you did that. And, you know, we were justified and you weren't and if you're already, if you're not willing to move beyond that and instead your goal is to defeat the enemy and to, you know, demolish their story and replace it with yours and get them to admit that they were wrong and you were right, like that agenda doesn't leave room for anything but more of the same. Right, right. Nothing else can get in, nothing can fit because it's already got the entire conceptual universe colonized. Right. It's the same mentality as, you know, the kind of dominant scientific paradigms. They've got the whole universe colonized already. Yeah, I guess in the Hawaiian culture they kind of, they bought into this idea already that there is a collective consciousness of the family and that they actually are affecting each other. Is that this family member is sick because of this dysfunction amongst, you know, and it's not your fault or their fault or that, you know, that it's something is deeper happening that has to be rectified. And yeah, right. So that's what people have to buy into. They have to know, yeah, we're all part of this thing. This is what you taught, you've been talking about. Right. That we're all part of this, we're all affecting each other and unless believe that it's going to defeat the purpose of these kind of rituals or they won't, they won't work, I guess. Right, because they don't work in a universe of, you know, of separate selves interacting according to impersonal laws of physics in an objective universe. Like how could they work in that universe? There's no causal explanation for it. So we have to step out of that universe, step out of the separate self in order to access these other kinds of technology. Yeah. I got one of those little messages says is unstable. I don't know. Yeah, I know. You know, part of it, Amy, part of the, like, I'm just in this stage of transition now. Like, I don't even have a house. I don't have an office. So I'm kind of trying to find places to do these things. And again, like this isn't, it's not coincidence. This is a synchronicity, too. It's easier to recognize synchronicities when they seem beneficial, you know, when they, when they are uplifting. But, but, you know, sometimes I feel like I'm being forced or walked, let's say walked through, walked on a path that I would never, ever have chosen consciously. But that's the only path to the place that I'm meant to go. So I'm kind of like dragging my feet on this path that right now, you know, includes a lot of instability and uncertainty. And, you know, I think, like, I'm some kind of new at these podcasts, too. And I want to do things like the interview format is a bit, I mean, it can work sometimes, but I want to really not always conform to that, you know, and I mean, I know what it's like to be an interviewee as well. I've done a lot of that. So like, I have, what would you, this is more like a conversation. Yeah. What would you say to me if we weren't being recorded right now? And you're just talking to Charles. What would I'm actually saying what I would say to you? Oh, okay. So I want to ask you a question, something I'm wrestling with. It's just that I've been going through a change just the past few months where I, you know, I just, I've become so disillusioned with our consensual reality of specifically politics in the media that I'm, I feel I have to pull away from it all because I'm being sucked into that whole thing, the fear. It just, it's just starting to seem so full of lies. And yeah, I used to, I would always vote. I must engage. I must be a good citizen. I, you know, I must change, you know, change the world. And now I'm feeling like I'm, it's starting to seem like a big fraud to me. It's all, it's all very fraudulent to me. And so, so I, I, I feel a little bad, but I, like I stopped getting the newspaper because I just can't, it's just, it's just permeating my being because I believe that my consciousness will affect my reality. Right? I don't want to start my day reading that. And now I've come to know because of various things that, that they were writing about, that I personally knew about are false. And yeah. So I think this is a very healthy response to not want to participate anymore, to not want to vote, to not want to read the newspaper, because your full, your full participation in that kind of legitimizes and validates it. And, and says that, and it kind of, yeah, legitimizes the story that says, here is what an active citizen should do to help contribute to a better world. Like it's offering you a set of procedures, a recipe, a frame within which to do that. But if that whole frame is a delusion, then why would you participate in it? And I think what's happening to you, this kind of disillusionment is really spreading. The, the, and in a way, like the increasing absurdity of the political culture is, is a good sign. It's a sign that the, that the game is almost up. Yes. It's kind of spinning off into this absurd realm where, where candidates are saying things that know, that almost nobody actually believes and, and that they themselves don't believe. And that's considered normal. Like nobody thinks that, that these candidates actually wholeheartedly believe in what they're saying. It's that they're like, and when they do say something, it's not analyzed for its content. It's analyzed for what its signals and what posture the politician is assuming and what is the messaging, you know, it's not even taken on face value. Like the communication is breaking down and it's becoming this, this farce. I mean, this is not, you know, any deep insight I'm having here. It's obvious that it's becoming a farce and, and a spectacle and no one really believes in it anymore, which means I think that it'll be, it won't take that much for us to let go of it. But I hope you're right. But then the thing is the other thing that's complicated, and this is interesting going back to the beginning of our discussion is that many of the people to that are these conspiracy type people, right? And they're just feet, they're saying, you know, everything they're saying is a blonde, they throw in the conspiracies and some of them might be true, some of them might be false, right? Weed from the chaff is very hard to discern it. When you get into a lot of that, right, you have to be very discerning. Most people aren't discerning. But discerning doesn't even actually help. But I'll respond to that in a minute. Yeah, go on. Yeah. So, but that, but then the horrible thing about that world, and they are attracted to me as well. They read my writings too, right? Right there, right? Is that it's so fear just makes you feel terrible. It's sort of addictive to fear type of thing. So you, it's like, it's, this is, you know, it's, you have to look and find the place just be this naive, Pollyanna person either and just be, oh, you know, it's really hard to find your place within this realm because the old structures don't are full of bullshit and the anti structures are full of bullshit. And so you have to find the yourself, you know, this is part of the transition from an old story to a new story, you know, you go through the space between the space between stories and maybe you try out many, many different stories and one of them could be the conspiracy realm. And then you think, then you realize, you know, regardless of the empirical evidence of whether it's true or false, it doesn't resonate with me. And, and, and who am I standing in this story, standing in the story of the reptilian overlords who are controlling everything. And, and they have technology far, far superior to anything we can imagine and mind control technology and, and it's all, you know, like, I see people get caught up in that and they become paralyzed. So that alone is enough to make me perhaps naively or innocently discard that story, that narrative, because of what it does to me, not because I've disproven it, not because I don't think that it's logically incoherent, but because of what it does to me. I agree. And so the deep assumption here, like when you, when you're saying, well, maybe some of them are true and some of them are false, the deep assumption that's shared by almost everybody is that there is an objective backdrop that defines what is true and what is false. You know, there's an objective reality outside of ourselves and the things that conform to that are true, the things that do not are false, but there is a reality out there. But, but what I'm, what I've been coming to, I mean, geez, for years and years now, my son right here is reading The Ascent of Humanity. I was writing this stuff like, here it is, yeah, like 10 years ago, you know, like, and my mind still has trouble wrapping itself around the idea that, that there isn't an objective reality out there. And that the basic elements of reality are not hard physical Newtonian objects, but are themselves stories, narratives. And this was, I mean, my friend, Bio Komalafi reports Nigerian shamans saying this, there are no facts, there are only stories. Then there's the postmodernist error or conceit, which says humans are the creators of these stories. But we can let go of that too and say, well, the stories maybe have their own consciousness. And it's kind of like the dream world, right, where the reality is fluid. It's, you know, what you think is what you create. If you're having a lucid dream or something like that. But that still puts the separate self at the center. You know, what if the dream has a being that's beyond ourselves and we are being created by the dream, you know, like, like, it's a collective, it's a collect. I mean, we're all doing it. You know, one of the things I talk about in the act of consciousness is, you know, the whole, the multiple worlds and, and that, you know, we're all, we're all collectively using our, our consciousness is affecting the unfolding of reality and it's all like this huge, open thing. And, and what we, what, what our story is is what's helping create it, right? So you like you say, you're meeting the world is meeting you, what you're putting out. Yeah, that's why it's important not to get into that fear thing, because the reptilian world is that, and that is, that is a world. I don't want to go in there. Oh, yes. So, I don't know. Here's another, another, you know, you sort of wonder, is this true or not? So the listener might teach, I guess, can I say one more thing though? Yeah, I've been studying Gary Sherman for many years and a lot of the meditations in my second book are from him. And what's great about him is that he really is trying to use these practices in day to day life. It's not according to any lineage in day to day life and using these practices in day to day life. And a lot of what he talks about is receiving information. You know, paying attention to your, when you, when you're watching all this, you know, this can you're, you know, you're, you're just getting another story. If you tune in, you'll get perhaps, perhaps to your, oh, yeah, I have, I have been trying to interrupt you for a while because I'm getting really spotty sound. I'm not even sure how much this is recording. Okay. Can we, there's a button that says stop video. Let's just audio record the rest of it. Is it on your screen? Yeah, I see it. Okay. So do that. I think we'll get a lot better bandwidth that way. Okay. Okay. So where, where was I? So I was, I was telling you about my teacher, Gary Sherman, about him teaching us to tune in and receive and so not buying into trusting our own source of information. But the important thing is, is, is that you're really tuning in to really to your inner self, your higher self, and not just more store fears. Rather than believing in these stories that other people are giving you, whether it be conspiracy or the collective media polity. And that's really actually also what I'm trying to do is teach people how to do that. I think that's our only way out. I don't know. But you, people like you and me are trying to, to find a way and help people find this new, new world. So yeah, I liked what you said about, you know, the, the reptilian world, the fear world. One of the assumptions that we carry from the age of enlightenment, you know, the scientific age is that the best way to be an effective person or the best way to navigate the world is to start with a set of solid principles. And then kind of apply those through logic to give us the answers. So that the most important thing you can do is to come up with, at the deepest level, you know, a correct metaphysical theory. And so it seems very important then to, to know, well, you know, what, what is the metaphysical status of stories, you know, are the things that people create? Are they beyond us, you know, and, and is, do we live in an objective reality, a subjective reality, an omnidjective reality, whatever, like, and if we can only come up with this complete, thorough account of reality, then we would know what to do. But, but like, I even question that, I mean, because it has me sitting around trying to figure out things mentally, and I never finish, you know, I never come anywhere near a complete thorough account of reality that would tell me what to do. So what I'm coming to is, I just want to navigate by something else that doesn't require me to know, that doesn't require me to understand everything, it doesn't require me to, to be able to account for everything in one or another conceptual category to, that doesn't require me to know how the world works. Like, I need, especially, because, you know, we had a story about how the world worked, and that story failed us as it failed you with your son. Right. And now, and maybe someday we'll have a better story about how the world works that again tells us how to navigate. But right now, we're in that space between, we don't have a navigating, we don't have a map anymore. And absent a map, well, what's the compass? You know, how do we, how do we navigate? And for me, it comes, it does come back a lot to, to, you know, how does it feel to be in that story? Or even when no story works, I mean, I've had situations come up in my life where I don't like any of the stories I could tell myself about it. Well, then what do I do? How do I choose? Maybe that's not even the right question. How do I choose? Maybe that's not the right question. Maybe I make my choices based on something completely unconscious. And then I tell myself I'm choosing when I'm not. I'm in this space of, I don't know, with all this, which it's fun to play with all the things that you're talking about. Yeah, yeah. You know, it's so, it's so, I mean, I myself want to find the new story too. Cause like, yeah, I'm like a researcher and scientist and I read all the stuff and I'm trying to, you know, I love seeing that, oh yeah, this Hoonus stuff aligns with the stuff in my second book and with these other ideas. And I'm kind of always trying to come up with the new unified theory, you know, of how I'm working. And yet, for example, my team, oh, it's just another story. Just go within and listen, you know. So maybe this, I think that human beings need stories too. There's part of us that needs some kind of structure to help us navigate. And then I think it's useful. That's why I want to write my third book, because A, it's a useful, it's full things that really work, things that make sense, things that help people. That's good. I don't think that's bad. And we can't always, every person can't trust themselves to, or isn't able to go within and he receive information from their higher self. It's just not possible. So, so tools that work like Hoonah, like homeopathy, I need it. I mean, yes, yeah, they're needed. But the trouble is, is that every tool is self perpetuating and then don't work, or they fall outside that, then people get angry, and then they go crazy. Yeah. Well, yeah, we're definitely not talking about forever letting go of story. Yeah, yeah. But we are definitely in a transition in our stories. Yeah. And I just hope the other end better. So Amy, I want to sign off in a minute or two here, but yeah. Okay. Is there anything else you'd like to just, like what, maybe like the core essence of your work and what you want to bring? Do you want to try to put that in a short statement? I guess what I usually try to say to people, remember that they, that there's more to themselves than they realize. And that, that you operate on many different levels. And yes, you have a physical body, but you have all these other aspects to your physical body. And that there's these other tools that can, can help you that you don't realize are out there. So homeopathy is one of them. You know, all these tools are there for us. And they also should give you confidence that things aren't as bleak as they seem. So, you know, I think things like synchronicity are, is just a different form of causality at a higher level of, or a deeper level of reality. And so the world is more mysterious than we think, which should give us hope that things aren't as bleak as we feel. And that we don't have to follow the prescriptions that everybody's telling us that there's different answers. I might paraphrase that in, to use your words and say, be open to the impossible. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And impossible, meaning of course, what we've been told is impossible. Yes. Yes. But which actually may be possible. Yeah. And if what, you know, if an incurable disease can be cured, then what else is possible on this planet? What else is, what other situations do we face ecologically, politically that seem incurable and that seem hopeless, but that when we shift our paradigm actually can be healed. Perfect. That's great. That's right. And you know, I, as, as in my life work, what I see happening is that somehow I'm like a connector. I'm able to like look at lots of different things and, and understand the relay and then explain them to people in kind of simple, in a simple way. And I mean, that's, I feel it's emerging is that's what's my task in this, this lifetime is a Claire. I see my husband calls me the clarifier. So I'm, I'm not there to be a deep scientific area. I'm there to sort of see all the connections and sort of explain it to people and try to help people. So anyway, that's who I am. Thank you, Amy. And for those people who might have missed the beginning, I've been talking to Amy Lansky, who I wrote the book Impossible Cure. And what's the title of the next one? The second one's called Active Consciousness. Active consciousness. That's right. Yes. And you can, we'll have the, her websites up on the screen. But the, they probably all link to each other. One of them is, is, is it? Yeah. Amy Lansky.com. Yeah. So yeah, that's impossible cure.com, active consciousness.com and Amy Lansky.com is my blog. All right. Great. So thank you, Amy. Thank you. Yeah, this was great. And so as usual, I'm Charles Eisenstein and this is, has been a new and ancient story. So yeah, we'll see you next time. Thank you. You've been listening to a new and ancient story with me, your host, Charles Eisenstein. To engage more deeply, you can join our community on new and ancient story.net where we have live chats, forums, meetups, and all kinds of other tools for collaboration. If you want to find out more about my work, then visit my website, CharlesEisenstein.net.